Chelyabinsk Regional Court on September 8 upheld a lawsuit to cancel the registration of Yaroslav Shcherbakov, a State Duma candidate from the Yabloko party. The decision was reported by several independent outlets, including Radio Liberty and The Insider.
The lawsuit was filed by Shcherbakov's rival in the Chelyabinsk single-mandate district, Artem Kungurtsev, a candidate from the Green party. According to The Insider, Yabloko has barely commented on the plaintiff, while the party's local branch, citing 7x7, describes Kungurtsev as a spoiler. The election commission's website lists Kungurtsev as 29 years old, self-employed, and a 2018 college graduate. Shcherbakov heads Yabloko's Chelyabinsk branch and works as a lawyer.
The lawsuit cited two campaign videos Shcherbakov posted on social media. One shows him in front of Banksy's "Girl with Balloon" graffiti and a portrait of academician Andrei Sakharov, with a quote by Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko on screen: "Better 10 years of negotiations than one day of war." The second video is a recording of Shcherbakov's speech at a Yabloko congress in Moscow, where he called for an end to political repression.
The plaintiff argued the use of the artworks and quotes violated copyright and constituted illegal campaigning. The prosecutor backed the lawsuit. Yabloko's press service said the ruling would be appealed, Radio Liberty reports.
Shcherbakov is one of dozens of Yabloko candidates who have lost registration or risk being removed from the ballot. According to The Insider, citing Vedomosti, 119 of the party's 137 single-mandate candidates remained registered. The party expects only about 108 will be able to continue their campaigns until election day.
Earlier, Yabloko was effectively barred from participating in the State Duma election via party lists after the Supreme Court annulled the registration of its federal list following a lawsuit by the Rodina party. Among the grounds cited were copyright violations involving Soviet poems, film fragments, the song "May There Always Be Sunshine," and an image generated by a neural network. Courts subsequently annulled the party's lists in Karelia, Pskov, Sverdlovsk and Kaliningrad regions. In St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, election commissions refused to register the lists.